


45 years

by lilbirdie



Category: The Umbrella Academy (TV)
Genre: Dolores is real, F/M, Human Dolores (Umbrella Academy), Let Number Five | The Boy (Umbrella Academy) Say Fuck, More tags will be added as I write more, Slice of Life, Slow Burn, Soft Number Five | The Boy (Umbrella Academy), Survival, dolores teaches five about affection and five teaches dolores karate, five and dolores’s misadventures in the apocalypse, im winging it, no beta we die like men, thats a tag lmao, theyre in love!!! theyre doing their best!!!
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-08-19
Updated: 2019-10-22
Packaged: 2020-09-07 04:09:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 3,826
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20303233
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lilbirdie/pseuds/lilbirdie
Summary: Five and Dolores, against the world.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> So this is a thing that I’m doing

For the first few days, he doesn’t even know her name. 

The only sound she makes is the quiet rattle of her breath, stuck somewhere deep in her chest. She sits and stares out at the rubble, the fires, the wreckage, and then she lies down and stares up at the grey sky and the swirling ash, and then she sleeps.

The burns on her legs aren’t as bad as Five had thought they were. When he’d first seen her lying on the pavement, they’d looked charcoaled and disfigured, but once he’d cleaned the dirt off he’d found the actual burns were patchy and mainly contained below her knees. They didn’t seem to be infected yet, so he took off his jacket and draped it over her, to stop the falling ash from getting in her wounds. 

He would have been concerned about the fact that she only had one arm, but he’d found a garishly pink prosthetic arm not too far from where he’d found her, so he figured that was an old injury.

He’d thought - foolishly, maybe - that if she survived, surely others might have too. He rushes back to the academy, checks Klaus’s pulse again, puts his ear to Allison’s chest again, shakes Luther until he realises he’s screaming, begging for them to wake up again, and then he rears back and vomits into the dirt.

He pats the fake eye tucked in his pocket. It feels heavier. 

There are a few other bodies he checks, too, once his stomach is empty and his eyes are dry. Some of them are burnt to a crisp, blackened and mangled and rotten. Other look almost peaceful, like they could be asleep. 

It hits him, then. 

He shouldn’t be here. He shouldn’t have saved the girl. Nobody should be left.

The world is dead and they should be dead along with it.

She fades in and out of consciousness for the next few days. The nights are cold, colder than Five expected, but there’s plenty of burning rubble to huddle around. He checks her pulse almost obsessively, especially when she starts to shiver.

_Please don’t die please don’t die please don’t die_

First aid was one of the many things their father taught them, and he’d dealt with injured civilians before, but this time is different. There is no ambulance on its way to take over.

They’re sheltering in what he thinks is a second hand store, judging by the remains of the sign outside. It’s the closest building with an intact roof, and there’s only one body. He nudges it behind the desk and pretends it isn’t there.

There’s a pharmacy just down the street. The walls are caved in, and the door is blocked by a large, smoking mass he tries not to look too closely at.

He digs around for anything that he could use - antiseptic cream, a box of Advil, bandaids, anything.

He finds a tiny green bottle amongst the fallen shelves. The label is burnt off, but there’s still liquid inside, and it smells like the stuff Grace sprays their cuts with, sharp and medicinal. He stands for a long moment, his nose to the bottle, thinking of Grace and her warm smile and funny little aprons and all the times she’d stitched him up, wiped the blood away, and said ‘good as new!’. 

The rest of the day is spent in a daze, half in his body and half out. Spraying the girl’s burns. Listening to her breathing. Brushing ash from his hair. Crying. Dry retching. He can almost feel his mother’s hand on his forehead, on his cheeks, brushing the tears away. 

She’s sitting and watching him when he wakes.

“Hi,” she says. Her voice is quiet and scratchy from disuse, and it sounds like it hurts her throat.

“Um,” says Five. He can _feel_ the tear tracts running through the dirt on his cheeks. “Hello.”

It’s the first time he’s spoken in a while, too. 

“Thanks,” she mumbles, and gently taps the bandages he’d wrapped around her legs. 

“Oh, uh. You’re - you’re welcome.”

He realises she’s holding the prosthetic arm he found in her lap.

“Is that yours?” he asks, stupidly, because it obviously is.

“Yes,” she replies, and waves her missing right arm to prove it. _Obviously._

He rubs the back of his neck. He is out of his depth, here. He could save civilians. Do first aid on civilians. _Talking_ to civilians? That had always been more Klaus’s thing. He rubs at his face, tries to brush the filth off, gain back a tiny bit of dignity.

“I’m Dolores,” she says.

“I’m Number Five.”

She frowns. 

“Number Five?”

“Well - just Five.”

“Are you sure?”

“What? Yes, I’m sure.” 

“Oh. Okay then.”

She tugs at a lock of her hair. It’s a auburn colour, not quite red and not quite brown, matted and dusty. For a second, with her messy bangs and timid expression, she looks like Vanya. 

“I found some food,” Five says and tears his eyes away, grabbing at the can he’d found and stashed. It had been lying on the pavement in front of a small grocery store, and he’d been saving it for when she woke up. He hadn’t found the courage to go inside any other stores. “If you’re hungry.”

Dolores holds her hand out, and studies it like it might secretly be poisoned.

“Spam,” she mutters, “awesome.”

She passes it back for him to open, and they share the can, scooping out the meat with their fingers. It drops straight to his stomach like lead. He shovels it into his mouth like a rabid animal, forcing himself to chew slowly, his tongue dry and swollen and taking up far too much room. Dolores eats carefully, her eyes unfocused, gaze fixed somewhere out in the ruins, her singular hand shaking as though she barely has the strength to hold it up.

She stops. Turns to him. She looks like she might cry, or attack him, or both.

“It’s just us. Isn’t it?” she whispers.

Suddenly, Five isn’t so hungry anymore. 

“As far as I... yes.”

She nods, sucks in a breath.

“Okay.”

She doesn’t speak again for the rest of the day, and neither does he.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Woo! I did it! Chapter 2! On time! I am so proud of me!

Dolores hisses as she gingerly removes her bandages. They’re stained with what might be either blood or dirt. She carelessly tosses them aside, and Five wrinkles his nose. 

The fresh bandages are melted to the plastic packet, so she holds them between her thighs and her teeth and picks at it.

“They look better,” Five remarks, gesturing to her legs. She nods. 

He sits on a chunk of rubble, bouncing his feet, wringing his hands, rubbing his palms together like it might spark _something_. There’s a wound up ball of nerves in the pit of his stomach, waiting, just waiting for him to let it out - but there’s something broken in there, too. Cracked glass, a muscle pulled too tight, a gun with the trigger snapped off. He clenches his fists, looking for that familiar blue flicker, anything at all, but no. There’s nothing. He’s tired, he’s so tired, he’s misplaced the key to his power and now he’s locked out, he has absolutely nothing left -

Dolores clears her throat. He stops.

“What?”

Mouth full, she simply raises a brow at him, then goes back to haughtily picking at her bandage. He takes a deep breath, the ashy air sticking to the roof of his mouth.

“Are you sure you don’t remember?” he asks again.

She sighs, drops the bandage into her lap.

“I remember just fine. There was a bang, and a... shockwave thing,” she replies, again.

“That doesn’t help me.”

“I don’t know what you want me to say! I have no idea what happened, okay?” Dolores exclaims, throwing her arms up. It looks strange, considering she only has one and a half. “Does it matter?”

“Does it matter?” Five says. “Yes, it _matters_!”__

_ __ _

“What are you gonna do about it? Huh?” Dolores gestures out towards the horizon. It goes on forever and a bit further, the same rubble over and over again, nothing, nothing, and more nothing. “The world is _over_! It’s _gone_! That’s _it_!”__

_ __ _

Her voice is high and unsteady, strung out. The bandages fall from her lap and into the dirt. She curses. 

__

Five pushes himself to his feet. His lip wobbles embarrassingly, and he turns his back to her and stares out at the endless wasteland. The fires have died down, but still the occasional fleck of ash floats down from the sky, an insulting imitation of a snowflake. It smells now, too. There are fewer bodies by the second hand store they’d holed up in, but the stench of death was everywhere. It was in the air, in his clothes, in his lungs. The whole world would stink of death forever. The Earth was rotting. 

__

“Five?” Dolores says, quieter this time.

__

He takes a second to compose himself before he answers. He swipes at his cheeks and finds no tears. He’d already cried them all.

__

“Yeah?”

__

“Can you pass me the, uh... anti-bacterial stuff?”

__

She doesn’t meet his eyes, and he doesn’t meet hers. 

__

__

They trudge down the street, feet stirring up clouds of ash and dust as they go, rounding smoking husks of burnt out cars and stepping over bits of debris. There are bodies, too, slumped over steering wheels, half in the car and half out, but he tries not to look at those. Dolores’s injured legs make the pace slow. They’re strong enough for her to walk on now, and even if they’re not she insists anyway. She limps and hisses quietly through her teeth in pain, and she has to lean on him for most of the way.

__

He almost feels sorry for her. 

__

“So... what’s your favourite colour?”

__

Almost.

__

“Why does that matter?” he sighs, kicking at a rock.

__

“It can say a lot about a person, you know. Their favourite colour.” Dolores taps her prosthetic, tucked under her arm. “Mine’s pink.”

__

He gestures to the arm. It’s so pink it hurts his eyes. 

__

“Yeah, I figured.”

__

Up ahead, the 7/11 he’d found the other day beckons them. The sign stands tall and unrelenting against the bleak sky, a splash of faded green and red on a grey canvas. Dolores breaks out into a grin when she sees it. 

__

The windows are shattered but the door is jammed, so they tiptoe over the broken glass. He pulls her up and through, and she falters as her feet hit the ground. He eyes her wrapped legs. No spots of blood, yet.

__

“You okay?”

__

“Yup, yup.”

__

Most of the shelves are knocked over, and one of the LED lights is hanging from the roof by a single cord, but it seems fairly intact compared to most other buildings. Dolores places her prosthetic by the door and with a deep breath, takes off into one of the remaining aisles. 

__

Five peers over the desk. The smell of the attendant’s corpse makes him gag.

__

“Don’t come over here,” he wheezes. Dolores hums.

__

She kneels down, very carefully, to pick through the stuff littering the floor. He tosses her a bag.

__

The small ice cream freezer is full of melted wrappers and brown sludge, so he passes by that. The sign is burnt and peeling, but a few bits of colour remain. Ben & Jerry’s, Cornetto. His father does not approve of ice cream, but that doesn’t stop them; he remembers sneaking out with his siblings, buying seven cones, the coolness on his tongue, laughter and smiles.

__

A taller fridge is tipped over and propped on a fallen shelf, the door hanging open and and the contents spilled all over the floor. He recognises cans of Coca Cola, Pepsi, Fanta, remembers what they taste like. Others are more foreign; Dr Pepper, Red Bull. He looks up at the store, and feels a pang of... longing. It’s a shadow of what it used to be. He would never see it properly, never buy anything from here, never get to taste everything. There are a few water bottles, so he grabs those. He considers a can of soda for a long moment before stuffing it in his bag.

__

“Hey, Five!” Dolores calls. She’s beaming, her bag over her shoulder, a candy bar in her hand. “It’s the good kush!”

He blinks.

__

“That’s a Twinkie, Dolores.”

__

She cackles, incredibly pleased with herself.

__

“Did you find any water?”

__

“Uh, yes.” He holds up his weighted bag as proof. 

__

“Cool. I found some crisps that aren’t gross.” 

__

They split the bag. The crisps are stale and taste vaguely of plastic, but they’re so delicious Five can almost feel himself vibrating with hunger. Dolores browses a disfigured magazine stand as she eats. 

__

“‘My husband cheated on me with the babysitter and killed the baby’,” she reads with a flair, pulling out one of the few magazines that’s still legible. “Wow, I totally believe that.”

__

“Who’s... Billie Eyelash?” 

__

Dolores spins on her heels, her eyes wide and furious.

__

“_Eilish_,” she hisses, “it’s _Eilish_! I swear to god.”

__

“Whatever. Eilish. Who’s that?”

__

“You don’t know who Billie Eilish is?”

__

“Obviously not, or I wouldn’t have asked.”

__

She raises her brows, skeptical.

__

“She’s a singer. A famous one? Do you live under a rock?”

__

He grumbles, and shoves more crisps into his mouth. The _you-do-not-belong-here_ feeling intrudes back on his mind, and he tries to drown it by reading the ingredients on the packet. Dolores watches him with thinly-veiled amusement. 

__

“So, are you gonna tell me what your favourite colour is?”

__

Five rolls his eyes.

__

“No,” he barks. 

__

“Aw, c’mon,” she whines, “I told you mine!”

__

“That was your decision.”

__

She sticks her hand in the crisp bag and scrapes out the last few crumbs. 

__

“I bet it’s... green.”

__

Five crumples the bag in his fist, tosses it at her face, and walks away. 

__

“Okay, okay! Sorry, geez,” she says, hobbling after him. “Look. We’re clearly going to be stuck together a while -“ Five winces at the reminder “- and I just thought, y’know, we should probably try to be friends.”

__

She smiles at him, hopeful. Something about the way she says it - friends - makes his gut twist so uncomfortably he has to shift to get rid of it. The only friends he can think of are his siblings, and that one little kid that lived down the street that was too starstruck to say anything but a nervous hello to them. The concept of friends had always been irrelevant, an unimportant side note in the back of his mind. Klaus boasted about them when he came home at midnight, marijuana smoke stuck to his clothes, Allison bemoaned at her lack thereof, Diego scoffed at the mere suggestion but watched groups of kids forlornly. He can hear Vanya asking he and Ben, as they listen to her violin, in a barely-there whisper, if they were friends. The 7/11 suddenly feels very big, and he suddenly feels very small.

__

“We could play 20 questions,” Dolores suggests, smiling wider.

__

The words seem to pour from his mouth without his permission. “20 questions?”

__

“Yeah. I ask you 20 questions, and you ask me 20 questions. We take turns. It’s fun.”

__

Five sighs.

__

“Alright, fine. But I go first,” he says. She nods enthusiastically. “What happened to your arm?”

__

“Ugh, I knew this was coming,” Dolores mutters, scoffing. “I, uh, got an infection when I was six. It had to be amputated.”  
She mimes slashing her throat. The awkward tone of her voice almost makes him regret asking. 

__

“That... sucks.”

__

She snorts. “Well, duh.”

__

She collects her prosthetic, still waiting by the door. In the amount of time they’ve been here, it’s gathered a fine layer of dust. She tries to blow it off, but it stays put.

__

“Okay, my turn. Um... why is your name Five?”

__

He almost tells her, but something makes him stop.

__

“My dad is just an asshole, I guess,” he finds himself saying instead, which is not a lie, but sounds better than the truth.

__

“Is it, like, short for something German?” she laughs.

__

“Hey, it’s my turn,” he protests, and she laughs a bit more.

__

He helps her climb out the window, secretly checks her wounds aren’t bleeding again. The wind has picked up. It streams through the desolate streets, hoisting the death-smell and the heat straight towards them, stinging his eyes. Dolores flinches.

“Um... how about...” he starts, and trails off. What do people normally talk about? “Uh, how old are you?”

__

“Fourteen,” she says, and puts her hand over her eyes as they make their way back to their second hand store. Five slings his bag over his shoulder. “How old are you?”

__

He groans, looks away. Almost trips on a rock.

__

“Thirteen,” he mumbles under his breath. Dolores smirks.

__

“Well, that explains why I’m taller than you.”

__

“You’re not taller than me.”

__

“Yes, I am.”

__

“No, you’re not!”

__

She keeps smirking.

__

“Maybe you’re taller by like - by like, an inch,” he splutters. “That doesn’t count. An inch is nothing.”

__

“Okay, Five.”

__

“It is!”

__

“Sure.”

__

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Five: what the FUCK is a pewdiepie  
I just picked Billie Eilish because I also have no idea how to pronounce it lmao  
I loved writing their banter, I hope you enjoyed it too!


	3. Chapter 3

Dolores cries herself to sleep. Five doesn’t sleep at all.

It’s dark, so dark he can’t see his hand right in front of him. The moonlight is cold and they’ve hidden themselves away from it, in a small cave made from rubble and blankets, an apocalyptic pillow fort. The wind groans and buildings creak, and he lies still and straight and shivering and waits to be crushed.

He thinks about rolling over, reaching out to her and tapping her shoulder and asking if she’s alright.

_Can’t sleep? Me neither. Maybe we should play one of your dumb games again._

But he’s stuck. He’s buried alive and his coffin is made of debris. He can almost feel his sibling’s frozen breath on the back of his neck.

He squeezes his eyes shut, tries to remember the warmth of his bed, tries to convince himself the creaking is just the old Academy walls shifting. 

Dolores sniffles quietly. The best Five can do is listen.

~~~

“Maybe it was aliens.”

“I highly doubt that.”

“Oh, c’mon, how would you know? Don’t say you don’t believe in aliens. If you don’t believe in aliens, we can’t be friends.”

Five knows it’s a joke, but his heart jumps anyway. Traitorous thing.

“I didn’t say that,” he grumbles. Dolores chuckles.

She’s sat on a park bench, fiddling with the dials on the radio they’d found in a camping store across the street. They’d tried at least ten, and this was the first one that actually worked.

“What about nuclear?” Five suggests. 

“Nuclear?” says Dolores. “If it was nuclear, we’d be dead, for sure. Also the sun would be blacked out, and it would be freezing. Nuclear winter, y’know.”

Five snorts.

“That’s stupid!”

“No it’s not, it’s true!”

“How the hell do you know that?”

“How do you _not_ know that?” She raises a brow at him. “With North Korea and stuff, the news won’t shut up about nuclear bombs.”

Five raises a brow back, pretends like he’s not surprised.

“North Korea.”

“Mm-hmm. Like South Korea, but north. And communist.”

She goes back to the radio, and Five stuffs his hands between his legs so they don’t start shaking.

The park they’re in is nothing more than a blackened field with a pile of twisted, unrecognisable play equipment, but the air feels fresher, thinner, more like air and less like smoke. The wind has died down from the usual gale. He still has to sit upwind of Dolores so her hair doesn’t blow in his face, but it’s bearable. Could almost be mistaken for a breeze.

Their bags of scavenged goods sit at his feet, and he absentmindedly kicks at the zipper. The tinkle sound it makes feels like a gunshot in the silence. 

It’s more comfortable to just look at his feet, or at Dolores. The scenery is a painting, a movie, fictional and surreal and it makes his head spin. There’s a lump in his throat that feels like vomit, or a cough, or a ball of ash, and he keeps swallowing but it won’t leave.

_You don’t belong here. You don’t belong here. This time is not for you._

It won’t leave.

Dolores suddenly sighs, slumps back. 

“This is pointless. There’s no one there.”

“Don’t be an idiot,” he says, and snatches it, “you’re just not doing it right.”

Dolores scoffs.

“Like you could do any better.” She crosses her arms, burrows her face into the bandana around her neck. “You won’t get an answer.”

Five moves through the channels, the static grating on his ears. He kicks at the zipper a little harder. The bag tips over.

“We might, if we keep trying.”

“Why don’t we just call up some martians while we’re at it?”

“Don’t be an asshole. We will get an answer. Eventually. Somebody will answer.”

She rolls her eyes. He grits his teeth.

“What, you don’t want anyone to answer? You just wanna stay alone forever, is that it?”

It bursts out of him before he can think about it. Dolores turns to glare, her lip curling. Her fist tightens, her back straightens.

“I did not say that!” she snaps.

“You might as well have!”

She leans forward, like she’s about to jump to her feet. The sharp feeling that begins to grow in the base of his stomach is familiar. 

“What the hell are you talking about?”

“Well, you’re so insistent there’s not gonna be an answer! How would you know?”

“Look around! Everybody’s dead!”

“There are other places, you know! Where people might be alive! You don’t know that everybody’s dead, you don’t know that!”

Finally, she stands. He follows, instinctively.

“If people are alive they’re not gonna be here!” Dolores yells, “they’re gonna be far away! Unreachable with that tiny radio!”

“So you’re just giving up, huh?” Five shouts. His dry, ashy throat burns, but it’s good. It makes everything else burn. He shouts again, and again. 

Dolores’s voice smudges into angry background noise, his voice smudges into angry background noise, blood roars in his ears, the world buzzes and vibrates. Everything is so loud. The world is too loud, his heartbeat is too loud. 

He automatically adjusts his stance, automatically squares his shoulders, raises his arm. He doesn’t realise what he’s done until the shouting stops and Dolores whimpers instead, clutching at her face.

“You hit me,” she says, and this time her voice is small. 

All the anger is gone in an instant. He presses his treacherous hands against his thighs until his arms shake. His palm stings.

She stares at him a moment longer. He goes to say something - apologise, swear, maybe - and she stumbles backwards, begins to walk away. 

“You’re psycho!” she cries, “you’re crazy! Stay away from me!”

He watches her go. 

Picks up the radio, smashes it to the ground. 

Silence.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> just realise it kinda sounds like five is tripping this chapter? oops. HES JUST GOT ANXIETY   
also. one of his main interactions with other people have been fights. anxiety + someone who has beat people up his whole life = trouble in paradise

**Author's Note:**

> It’s a bit short, but hopefully other chapters will be longer!  
This is just me trying to get into the flow of writing again. Also I love Five and Dolores.  
Just a warning: updates will probably be irregular because I am the queen of procrastination 👑  
I hope you enjoyed!


End file.
